Tag: economics

Underground Economy

This book treats crime, gangs, poverty, micro-finance, the foundations of cooperative behavior, urban economics, Jane Jacobs, what the police maximize, and why so many barbershops rent out their back rooms to prostitutes, all rolled into one fascinating and profound volume.

the underground economy in the us is a sizable portion of GDP. about time that it got more attention. i also heard that grameen bank is now doing microloans in the us.

Hard SF Economics

Maybe a true hard sf author in 2020 will have to master not just physics, biology, computer science, economics, sociology, psychology – and write well, of course. We better invent brain enhancements quickly if we are to get anybody with that kind of expertise.

Got Milk?

A maverick dairyman named Hein Hettinga started bottling his own milk and selling it for as much as 20 cents less than the competition, exercising his right to work outside the rigid system that has controlled US milk production for almost 70 years. Soon the effects were rippling through the state, helping to hold down retail prices at supermarkets and warehouse stores. That was when a coalition of giant milk companies and dairies, along with their congressional allies, decided to crush Hettinga’s initiative. For 4 years, the milk lobby spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions and made deals with lawmakers. Last March, Congress passed a law reshaping the Western milk market and essentially ending Hettinga’s experiment — all without a single congressional hearing.

the account of the dairy industry cartel

P != NP

can NP-complete problems be solved efficiently in the physical universe? All hunches would say no, but then we only discovered polynomial time factorization using quantum algorithms 10 years ago.

2011-08-12: Markets being efficient and P != NP can’t both be true, it turns out. So either you can compute fast or make money on the stock market. It remains unclear whether you can MAKE MONEY FAST or not.
2017-01-04: The history of P != NP

In 1955, John Nash sent a remarkable letter to the National Security Agency, in which—seeking to build theoretical foundations for cryptography—he all but formulated what today we call the P=?NP problem, considered one of the great open problems of science. Here I survey the status of this problem in 2017, for a broad audience of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. I offer a personal perspective on what it’s about, why it’s important, why it’s reasonable to conjecture that P≠NP is both true and provable, why proving it is so hard, the landscape of related problems, and crucially, what progress has been made in the last half-century toward solving those problems. The discussion of progress includes diagonalization and circuit lower bounds; the relativization, algebrization, and natural proofs barriers; and the recent works of Ryan Williams and Ketan Mulmuley, which (in different ways) hint at a duality between impossibility proofs and algorithms.

2022-12-03: Why are there complete problems, really?

This, then, is how universality of computation explains the existence of complete problems. For virtually any class we might define there will be a way of handicapping the universal computer such that it is still able to solve all of the problems in the class while at the same time not breaking the class specific resource constraint.

We can now see that the existence of complete problems is a direct result of one of the core features of computers that also makes them relevant to the real world.